Krusemark Elizabeth A, Lee Christopher, Newman Joseph P
Psychology Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Personal Disord. 2015 Jan;6(1):12-21. doi: 10.1037/per0000087. Epub 2014 Oct 20.
Narcissistic personality disorder is associated with distinguishing traits including self-enhancement, arrogance, and intense reactivity to ego threat. Theoretical accounts of narcissism suggest these heterogeneous behaviors reflect a defensive motivational style that functions to both uphold and protect the self-concept. However, the notion that narcissism can be characterized by grandiose and vulnerable dimensions raises the possibility that these diverse behaviors represent distinct expressions of narcissistic defensiveness. The present study examined whether both dimensions exhibit a general defensive style marked by selective attention to evaluative stimuli or are differentially associated with selective attention to positive and negative information, respectively. Using a dot probe task consisting of valenced and neutral trait adjectives, we evaluated these hypotheses in a group of male offenders. Results indicated that vulnerable narcissism was associated with attention biases for both positive and negative stimuli, though the dimension was further distinguished by disengagement difficulties and a greater recognition memory bias in response to negative words. Conversely, grandiose narcissism was associated with increased accuracy when attending to positive stimuli and directing attention away from negative stimuli. Overall, these findings suggest narcissistic individuals share motivated selective attention in response to evaluative stimuli, while simultaneously highlighting important phenotypic differences between grandiose and vulnerable dimensions.
自恋型人格障碍与一些显著特征相关，包括自我提升、傲慢以及对自我威胁的强烈反应。关于自恋的理论解释表明，这些不同的行为反映了一种防御性动机风格，其作用是维护和保护自我概念。然而，自恋可分为夸大和脆弱两个维度这一观点，引发了一种可能性，即这些不同的行为代表了自恋防御的不同表现形式。本研究考察了这两个维度是否都表现出一种以对评价性刺激的选择性注意为特征的一般防御风格，或者是否分别与对积极和消极信息的选择性注意存在差异关联。我们使用了一个由有正负效价和中性特质形容词组成的点探测任务，在一组男性罪犯中对这些假设进行了评估。结果表明，脆弱型自恋与对积极和消极刺激的注意偏向都有关联，不过该维度在脱离困难以及对消极词汇的更大识别记忆偏向方面表现得更为突出。相反，夸大型自恋与在关注积极刺激以及将注意力从消极刺激上转移时的准确性提高有关。总体而言，这些发现表明自恋个体在面对评价性刺激时存在有动机的选择性注意，同时也凸显了夸大和脆弱两个维度之间重要的表型差异。
